


Whatever Our Souls Are Made Of

by zjofierose



Series: Zjo's zine fics [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fate & Destiny, First Meetings, Fluff, M/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, Wish Fulfillment, Wishes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 09:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23969227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: ~Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine, they are the same.  - E. Bronte--"If you fold a thousand paper cranes, you'll get to meet your soulmate," his mother had told him when he was little, and sent him into space with a pack of paper as thick as his hand. / "Whisper your wish in the the rabbit's ear," his father had told him, folding a perfect origami rabbit and setting it on the table. "Maybe he'll tell it to the Moon Rabbit, and then it will come true."--A story of two soulmates, living in hope.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: Zjo's zine fics [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1503608
Comments: 11
Kudos: 108
Collections: Star-Crossed: Sheith Soulmate Zine 2020





	Whatever Our Souls Are Made Of

**Author's Note:**

> A fic that I was very honored and happy to be able to write for Starcrossed: A Sheith Soulmates Zine. Also, a collaboration with the incredibly talented [@bansheebender](https://twitter.com/Bansheebender)! Such a privilege.

\---

“Like this, baby, you have to line up the edges just so…”

Shiro watches as his mama carefully presses the pastel patterned paper into a perfect triangle before opening it and folding the other way. He looks down at his own square on the low table in front of him, taking it carefully in his hands and pulling at it, laying it flat. 

“Careful, sweetheart.” His okaa-san’s voice is soft behind him, and her arms come around his shoulders, her large hands covering his as she straightens the paper under his fingertips. “Don’t rush.”

“I’m trying,” Shiro says, and feels his okaa-san laugh against him. 

“I know, baby,” she says, “and it’s okay. If this one won’t fly, we can always make more. Your mama has enough paper for a whole flock of cranes.”

Shiro doesn’t have to see his okaa-san’s face to know that she’s making a gooey expression at his mama; he can hear it in her voice. He refocuses on the paper at his fingertips, watching as his okaa-san’s hands guide his own, hers strong and precise where he’s all thumbs. 

“Why do you have so much paper, mama?” he asks, letting his okaa-san turn his paper and begin a new series of folds. She laughs again, the sound warm against his ear.

“Because she thought she’d need it,” his okaa-san says, and Shiro frowns up at her, confused. This is another one of those adult things, where they say a thing that you can’t understand that’s only funny to them. It’s annoying.

“Shiro, honey, the old stories say that if you fold a thousand paper cranes in a year, you’ll meet your soulmate,” his mama explains, leaning over to correct his hand position just slightly. “I wanted to meet mine.”

“What’s a soulmate?” Shiro asks, eyes on his mama’s face as she looks up at his okaa-san, and her expression goes soft and warm. 

“It’s the one person in the whole universe who is made to be a perfect match for you, baby,” his okaa-san tells him, her arms still warm around his shoulders. “The person who will love you more than anyone else, and who you will love just as much.”

Shiro’s hands stop on the paper. 

“Would they love me more than you do?”

“No one can love you more than we do, baby,” his mama leans forward to pat his cheek, “never doubt that.”

His okaa-san hums thoughtfully. “It’s a different kind of love. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

Shiro thinks this over, taking the somewhat crumpled piece of folded paper up in his hands. “Mama, you made a thousand cranes?” he asks, “so you’d meet Okaa-san?”

“I did.” She beams, and Shiro feels his cheeks flush. “I made a thousand, and we hung them from our chuppah when we married.”

“She was ready to make a thousand more if she didn’t get who she wanted,” his okaa-san says drily, and Shiro’s mama leans in, kissing his okaa-san over his head. 

“Hey!” Shiro protests, moving his hands as they draw back, laughing gently at each other. “You made me squash it!” He moves his hands to reveal the mangled half-formed crane beneath them. He can feel his eyes start to well up with tears.

“Oh, baby,” his mama leans in to kiss him, too, and takes one of his small hands in hers, turning it over. “Here. You can have mine.”

Shiro sniffs. The crane in his hand is perfect, edges crisp and wings sharp and bright. It’s everything his crumpled half-bird isn’t. 

He sets it carefully to the side. “No,” he says, unfolding his square of paper, smoothing it out as best he can. “I want to make my own. Show me again.”

\--

“Papa,” Keith breathes, his dark eyes wide, “it looks so _real_.”

His father laughs, and sets the small paper rabbit in Keith’s chubby little hand. “He _is_ real, a real little Brer Rabbit just for you.” 

“What’s his name?” Keith’s voice is soft and reverent as he brings the rabbit up to his face to examine it more closely. 

“I don’t know, son.” His father ruffles his hair, and Keith leans into the touch, smiling. “You tell me.”

“I’m gonna call him Rabbit,” Keith declares firmly, and his father chuckles, pulling out another small piece of notebook paper. 

“That’s a good name. Here, though,” Keith’s dad reaches out and twitches one long paper ear upright. “You gotta whisper a wish in his ear. Then when he jumps up into the sky at night, he can tell it to the Rabbit in the Moon, and maybe it will come true.”

Keith’s eyes go round, his little round-cheeked face serious. “What should I wish for?” he asks, and his father smiles, his big, rough fingers creasing the paper easily on the kitchen table. 

“I can’t tell you what to wish for,” he says, “and you shouldn’t tell me what you decide, either. But here,” he takes the paper bunny from Keith’s hand and sets it on the table. “Let’s make him a little friend. Are you watching?”

Keith scoots closer, eyes intent on his father’s hands. “Yes, Papa. I’m watching.” 

\--

Before Keith goes to bed that night, he lines up five perfectly folded origami rabbits on his windowsill, largest in the middle. It’s taken him all day to think of his wish, but now he strokes one careful childish finger down the head of the largest rabbit, then bends down to whisper in its ear. 

“I want to have a soulmate,” he tells it, and smiles. It doesn’t smile back, because it is paper, but he thinks that if it could, it would.

\--

“Are we there yet?” Shiro asks, letting himself float freely a half-meter from the top of his cabin. A pale blue paper crane bobs gently next to him in the zero-grav of his little ship.

“Ha ha, very funny, Shirogane.” Mission Control’s voice is still crackly, even though Shiro’s back within Mars’ orbital path and closing on Earth all the time. “Are you still floating around like a balloon? Then no. No, you are not there yet.”

“How much longer?” Shiro whines, grinning to himself. He knows the answer perfectly well, of course he does, but winding up Mission Control is one of his few hobbies, so he lets himself indulge. 

“Forever.” Matt’s voice is as flat as the desert around the Garrison headquarters and twice as dry. “It’s a Zenoian Dichotomy. You will never arrive. You will float in your tin can for all eternity, spaceman.”

“ _Ugh_.” Shiro flips over, aiming his feet at what’s ostensibly the floor and waving his arms to disperse the ever-growing flock of paper cranes that tumble and float around him. “You’re no fun.”

“Ten more days, Shiro. Hang in there.”

A tiny crane made of pale pink paper and sprinkled with a miniscule cherry-blossom print bumps gently into his nose. He blows it away, watching as it turns end over end before bouncing off the viewscreen.

“Ten more days,” he says, and grabs the pad of paper his moms had sent with him. It’s nearly empty, as attested by the eight-hundred-and-some small cranes that flock around him in every corner of his ship these days; green ones, pink ones, yellow ones, blue ones. Ones with polka dots and ones with stripes; plain ones and neon ones and the tiniest pure white ones. 

“You can do it,” Matt says sympathetically, and Shiro flicks the comms off. 

He can do it. 

He pulls off another piece of paper and begins to fold.

\---

Keith wakes up with the dawn, always has, even as a child. Used to drive his father batty, he thinks fondly, stepping out of his bed and stretching in front of the open window. It’s mid-summer now, warm even before the sun’s fully up.

He pulls the covers straight on his bed and shuts the window, drawing the curtains. His bedroom’s upstairs, and it’s only going to get hotter; keeping the room dark and the outside air outside is the best he can do to have any hope of it cooling off enough that he can fall asleep before midnight.

He takes a shower and heads downstairs to help himself to breakfast. His dad’s off on a week-long fire-fighting skills refresher so that he can pass his annual recertification qualifiers, ergo he won’t be coming by today. He’d moved into town a few years back to rent a small apartment near the fire station, leaving Keith the farmhouse and the land surrounding. Keith had already turned the old shed into a more-than-serviceable mechanic’s workshop, and he keeps busy tuning up farm equipment and doing oil changes better than the chain store in town. 

Keith pours himself some orange juice and drops some bread in the toaster. “Good morning, Rabbit,” he says, tapping a rather worn-looking paper rabbit gently on the nose where it sits in the kitchen window. It holds pride of place among a collection of thriving succulents and several smaller paper brethren of various ages and patterns. 

In fact, the whole house is filled with paper rabbits of varying description, the smallest barely larger than a fingernail, while the largest, made of posterboard and guarding the door, is fully the size of the hares that jump in the desert outside. They sit on bookshelves and window sills, on top of the fridge and on the back of the toilet, hundreds of small paper faces peering into the world with silent wisdom.

“Did you tell the Moon Rabbit my wish last night?” Keith asks, flipping the toast deftly out of the toaster and onto a plate. He chugs his orange juice down and rinses his glass, setting it in the dish drainer before grabbing his toast. “No? Ah, well. You should, one of these days.”

He takes a bite and brushes crumbs into the sink. He’s got someone bringing over a tractor at one, but until then he’s planning to work on the hoverbike he got cheap at the swap meet a month ago. He’s been tweaking her steadily, and she’s almost ready for a test ride.

\---

“Okay,” Shiro says to himself as he presses the paper closed, then opens it into its new form. It’s the last crane he’ll make up here; the last piece of paper from the thick pad his mothers had given him before he left. He’s been saving it for a couple days now, in spite of how his fingers have itched for something to do, and he’s glad he waited.

It hovers in front of him, a perfect cherry red, and he pauses, thinking of his wish. 

His landing sequence is due to start in five minutes; probably he should wish for safety, or a good landing, or hell, a promotion when he gets through all the debriefs. But… he reaches out to touch the tip of a bright-red wing, watching as the crane slowly rotates in response to his gentle prompting. 

It’s the only thing he’s ever wished for; he can’t bring himself to break tradition now.

“I wish to meet my soulmate,” he whispers, then exhales hard and sends the little crane swooping and diving around the cockpit until it crashes into the hovering flock above Shiro’s head and stills, wings caught with its fellows. 

The clock is ticking. Shiro closes his eyes, breathes deeply. He’s done this a hundred times before.

“You ready, Captain Shirogane?” 

“Yes ma’am,” Shiro answers, “ready on my mark.”

“Ready, sir. We’ll be waiting for you.”

Shiro grins and settles his hands on the controls of his ship. Earth is big and blue and beautiful before him, and he’s ready, so ready, to go home.

“Mark,” he says, and fires thrusters.

\--

It’s too late to pull out of his descent when the rear thrusters fail. It’s all Shiro can do to slow his controlled fall by altering course and trajectory, strapped into his chair and white-knuckling the controls as he watches the angles flashing past on the console in front of him. The juddering shake of re-entry has his thousand cranes spiraling around the cockpit, a shaken tempest of colored wings as he plummets toward the earth.

\---

It’s only minutes after Keith finishes his lunch of leftover stir-fry from the night before, just as he’s folding the final creases onto a small, plain, black rabbit, that he hears the noise. It doesn’t really register at first; the farmhouse is near enough to the Garrison base that he hears air traffic all the time. He’s not directly under a flight path, but shuttles and ships go by with regularity.

“I wish,” Keith says softly to the little rabbit, turning it over in his hand, “I wish I had a soulmate.”

It’s when his bowl begins to rattle on the table in front of him that he realizes the noise is much louder now, much louder than it should be, for sure, and runs out the front door. He can see a flaming streak across the sky, big and getting bigger fast, clearly a shuttle of some kind on its way to Earth and coming in hot. Keith stands, staring, as the streak of light comes closer and closer, and by the time he realizes he should probably take cover, it’s already too late.

He just has the presence of mind to dive for the porch and cover his ears as the ship crash lands on the small hill just beyond the house, skidding across the hard-packed dirt until it comes to a stop not three feet from Keith’s front steps. 

Keith slowly lowers his hands from his head, mindlessly reshaping the small black rabbit still in his grasp as he studies the ship. The ship’s intact, though obviously damaged, but there’s no fire, no smoke rising. This was a crash landing, but it was still a _landing_ , and one that must have required a very skilled pilot to have pulled it off, he thinks. 

He’s stepping forward with the thought that he should run and get his tools, figuring he’ll have to pry the ship open to see if the pilot’s okay, when the hatch opens, releasing a sudden gasp of pressurized air. Keith holds his hand to his eyes and squints into the darkness.

“Hi,” a voice says, and Keith feels his eyes widen as a tall man in a flightsuit steps out. He staggers, hand reaching out to grip the hull, and Keith jumps forward to steady him. There’s a small red origami crane sitting on his shoulder, and the sheer incongruousness of it makes Keith giggle.

The pilot smiles, and it’s like the sun comes out and the angels sing. Keith can’t help but smile back, struck dumb by the presence of the man beside him.

“Hi,” he answers, voice soft and rusty. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hi. I’m Keith.”

He starts to offer his free hand to shake, but realizes that he’s still holding his small black bunny, so he offers that instead. “Welcome home,” he says, and means it more than he’s ever meant anything in his life.

\---

Shiro thinks he may have died. Here, in front of him, is the most beautiful man he’s ever seen. Here is the most beautiful man he’s ever seen, and he’s holding out one finely-boned, grease-stained hand, and offering Shiro a perfectly formed (if slightly mangled) origami rabbit. 

“Welcome home,” the man, Keith, says, and it’s like a blessing and a gift all in one.

Shiro takes the tiny rabbit like it’s the most precious thing on Earth, cradling it in his own gloved palm. The motion of his gesture shakes something loose from his shoulder, a flutter of red catching in the corner of his eye. He looks down to find his last paper crane resting on his boot.

It’s a sign; it has to be. Shiro’s heart tumbles in his chest as he reaches down and picks up the little crane, settling it gently into Keith’s palm.

“Thanks, Keith,” Shiro breathes, watching as Keith examines the little bird with clear and unabashed delight. “I’m Shiro. It’s good to be home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love, uwu. Please love me!
> 
> hmu on Twitter @zjofierose


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